Present physics dictates that all podcasts must begin as (or eventually converge into) one of the following categories. This is a function of the natural laws of determinacy and causation, and not a function of a global producer-conspiracy, though that is not what the producers say.
All my friends are funny so I never edit them
Other people do not have funny friends so we recorded ours. This sounds arrogant but turns out to be a pretty safe bet because most people’s lives are a hellscape. Expect many “friends of the podcast” and eventually some merchandise fused in the molten centre of a vortex of in-jokes.
Subcategories: I do technically edit them for the long pauses, or: I am funny so I never edit myself.
You never thought about X but here is how it works
SHOOP schwing what if I told you bloodlidebeep that all around us BWARP are forces bubble bubble that shape our world? [reverb into an unending void, only the ceaseless accumulation of facts can distract me from my certain death].
Subcategories: all history, all engineering, all economics, all news. Trumpcasts will eventually be subsumed here when their original staff die off from futility-induced apoplexy.
Each week we investigate: will people reveal their deepest trauma to strangers in a studio? Yes.
Suicides, breakups, victims speaking to perps; no trauma is too large for us to pair it with some melancholy banjo. Because I was deprived of intimacy as a child I now believe that sadness and meaningfulness are the same thing.
Subcategories: This is not a spoof I really do think this, I once had to leave the gym crying to Esther Perel.
Murder is a thing that happens
Some people are dead now.
Subcategories: high-budget noir, low-budget roundtable, this is the 700th project we have embarked on that allows us to look at crime scene photographs but that’s probably not something we should discuss in therapy.
Fiction
Is either an amalgam of the above, or a BBC radio drama and is as such the one true art.
Patreon made us millionaires for some reason
Your new lexicon will befuddle your increasingly isolated friends and family for a small monthly payment, which is also the business model of most cults. Now buy a mattress.
I have absolutely no idea what any of this means. Not a single word.
I got some of it, but that may be because I have read more McSweeneys than you have.
Even if I knew what this assemblage of letters into word like structures meant, I still wouldn’t care.
Because this is starting to look like ganging up, I will say that I thought it was kind of funny and clever as well as being somewhat opaque.
strike “being”